Turn 25 of 44

Wash Carol's hair and see her dyed black hair with some blonde streaks wash out and reveal a beautiful chestnut brown color. You then set her pin curls while the two of you gossip about the street. You tell 45 minutes until her hair is ready and you can Do Carol's makeup to match yours, Vivian's and ever other housewife exactly. She agrees and you do the makeup and add the permanent red lipstick.

You sit Carol down at the vanity and wet her hair at the basin you somehow know is there, warm water running over your dainty fingers as the dye lifts. Her black runs off in gray-blue rivers, the streaks dissolving, and underneath, rising like a photograph in a developer tray, comes a rich chestnut brown — warm and glossy and absolutely hers. 'Oh, sugar,' you coo, working the suds through, 'this color was just *hiding*.' Carol watches in the tri-fold mirror with her permanent smile and doesn't ask how you know what's under her hair. Gals just know.

You comb it out and set the pin curls, section by section, teaching her to hold the curl, to wind it, to pin it snug — 'not a minute under forty-five, honey, a set this deep has to bake' — and while her head fills with little neat rows the two of you settle into gossip like it's a rocking chair. The Hendersons' lawn. The woman at 14 Birchwood who may not even *own* an apron. The Delgados, moving onto Azalea Court next month, and neither of them cooks, can you imagine. Carol giggles at all the right beats, and her giggle has the same lilt as yours now, and she doesn't notice, and you don't either.

'While she sets, we'll do your face,' you announce, flipping open the little case from the vanity drawer. 'Forty-five minutes, and by then your hair will be *swell*. And your makeup, honey — we'll do it to match mine exactly. And Vivian's. Every gal on this street wears the same face, it's just how we're made.'

'Exactly alike,' Carol says dreamily. 'Isn't that just *divine*.'

So you build her face the way it was built on you — powder like pearl, the eye done just so, and last, the lipstick, dark red, the shade that doesn't come off at supper or in the sink or ever. You color her lips in careful strokes and she watches, rapt, and when you hand her the mirror her white even teeth flash in a smile identical to the one sitting on your own face.

'Well, I declare,' Carol breathes. 'I'm *beautiful*.'

Her nails are still bare, ten little blanks waiting. You hold up the polish bottle and tap it thoughtfully against the vanity — red like yours, or something else entirely. 'Nails are a gal's own business,' you hear yourself say, quick and flat, and don't know where you got it.